Semalt Expert: Removing Bogus Referral Visits From Google Analytics

Have you noticed a lot of referral visits in the Google Analytics reports that look bogus? If that’s the case, you might have the problem of ghost spam – a type of spam that affects a large number of websites and users on the internet. Unfortunately, Google Analytics provides no solution to this problem, and you never get to know how to block the spammers. Lisa Mitchell, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, states that the only way to get rid of them is by sticking them manually with filters. Yes, you can filter them out of the Google Analytics, and that’s the only option you have.

You might have gone through some posts explaining how to use .htaccess files for blocking referral spam. The experts at Rocketspark provide their customers with useful information on how to filter out the referral spam and ensure your safety on the internet. What happens if your analytics profiles receive ghost spam? As with the email spam, referral spam can be filtered or blocked. A webmaster must prevent search engine spiders from indexing the website logs by moving them to the non-public areas such as password-protected places. He should use the robot exclusion files or append the nofollow values to the links.

It has been observed that referral spam pollutes a lot of Google Analytics reports every month. Some spammers hit the web servers and your blogs, creating fake views and tricking your analytics reports. For over three years, new variations of referral spam have been introduced on the internet. Spammers use a variety of techniques to damage your site’s ranking in the search engine results. The spammers don’t visit the websites. They only create fake views and trick your Google Analytics account. If you want to stop ghost spam, you should create filters in Google Analytics for blocking them. You can follow these simple steps in this regard.

Step 1

Go to the Admin section in your Google Analytics account. Here you have to select the All Filters section under the account’s column. The next step is to click the New Filter option and give the filter a proper name. You should also set the Campaign Source in the Exclude section.

Step 2

The Filter Pattern is where you should copy and paste the list of all your domains and subdomains you want to block from the referral traffic. Keep an eye on how they get separated via the pipe characters, and that vertical line is located on the keyboard. It is possible to add more than one domain, but the total limit of characters is 255, so you can repeat the process thrice to filter out all of your websites.

Step 3

Next, you should apply the filters to all of the web pages. For this, you should click on the Add button and apply the changes before closing the window.

Step 4

You should not forget to click on the Save button. Always remember that the filters can remove the spam websites from the time they have been added. So, you will have to wait for a few hours or days before the outcomes are noticed in your Google Analytics report.